What was she thinking, walking home alone? What was she thinking, wearing that? What was she thinking, getting that drunk? What was she thinking, getting a taxi by herself? Last month, a woman was brutally attacked while walking home from a house party in the early hours of the morning. The attack happened in the Togher [...]
The stereotypical whistling builder is the standard starting point for any discussion about gender based street harasment, which usually ends in someone telling a feminist to ‘relax, love’. But, campaigners say, street harassment is a real issue with real life consequences for women’s lives. The international campaign group Stop Street Harassment defines gender-based street harassment as [...]
We live in an age of unprecedented equality between parents, but, almost three years in, I can confirm that it’s news to many people that men can be parents too. Many of my female friends out-earn their husbands and partners. Sometimes, the early rationale for their career decisions included an expectation that the man would take [...]
It’s easy to blame Church and State for all the ills that have blighted Irish society. Warehousing the poor in workhouses; separating children from their parents in industrial schools for the crime of poverty; enslaving women in Magdalene laundries for the crime of pregnancy. But those whose ancestors incarcerated women with the temerity to bear children [...]
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern gave birth yesterday to a beautiful baby girl. Mother, baby, and soon to be stay-at-home Dad are reportedly all doing well. She will take six weeks’ maternity leave, and her husband will take over childcare duties after that. The overwhelming reaction online was ‘Woman gives birth. So what?’. But it’s [...]
It’s been twenty years since viewers around the world gasped at the audacity of four New York women who weren’t afraid to talk about sex, vibrators and orgasms. They said aloud all the things that magazines like Cosmopolitan had been writing for years. And it made them a worldwide hit, for a market starved of television [...]
When Constance Markievicz made history as the first woman in the British Isles to be elected a Member of Parliament, it must have been an epic moment. 100 years ago next year, (some) women across the United Kingdom, then including Ireland, got the vote, and the first to be elected was an Anglo-Irish republican socialist from [...]
The Irish women’s rugby team - the multiple Six Nations winning side that also managed to take home a Grand Slam in 2013 - is competing this week in the Women’s Rugby World Cup. Forget booking flights and expensive trips Down Under, this one is taking place right under our noses, at a time and in [...]
Me on my first day back at work after maternity leave. There was a LOT of concealer involved. Thousands of us do it every year and thousands more have been here before us. We trudge, skip or sail back into the office after between six and ten months at home, learning how to cope [...]
In Rwanda in 2013, I walked among display cases full of skeletons, trying hard not to cry because it was not my tragedy. An atrocity like the Rwandan genocide diminishes each of us individually and as a part of humanity. But it was not my grief to own or display and I did not want to be [...]
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